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JP - Tube chat campaign horrifies London tube users

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JP - Tube chat campaign horrifies London tube users

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... because it challenges the adoption of what Simmel called the "reserved" attitude and the calculating intellect?

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The perception of the London commuter as an unfriendly curmudgeon has been bolstered by the mixed reaction to a mystery campaign to encourage tube passengers to chat.

Badges emblazoned with the question "Tube chat?" have been distributed on the London Underground network, to the horror of some regular users.

Transport for London (TfL) said it was not behind the badges, which are identical in font and design to the official "Baby on board" pins given to expectant mothers.

Commuters were quick to express their disdain for the idea, for which no individual or group has claimed responsibility.

Glitterish Allsorts (@GlitteryAllsort)
What is this monstrosity?! This is too much. Make it stop. Say no to #tube_chat https://t.co/AWKmhWQ8MJ

Robert Perry (Pez) (@pez_sez)
My #tube_chat thoughts, in three tweets:
1. People would prefer a "Do Not Disturb" sign pic.twitter.com/Igh8YsPGKJ

Al McCartney (@almccrtny)
#tube_chat? pic.twitter.com/AWctH9alFV

The badges come attached to a small piece of card, which reads: "Have a chat with your fellow travellers. Wear this badge to let others know you're interested. You'll benefit from a daily chat. Start using it today!"

But some commuters did react warmly to the badges:

Sameer (@SameerMerali)
YES YES YES YES YES #tube_chat pic.twitter.com/MQLZmREQkO

A TfL spokeswoman said: "It's definitely not something we have created. We are trying to get in touch with the people behind them as we never allow people to use our branding unless they have our permission.

"This sort of stuff is quite dangerous; we don't want people to get confused.

"While it is an interesting idea, we don't want people using our branding."

"Baby on board" badges can be ordered from TfL to help mothers-to-be secure a seat without embarrassment.

Badges for people with disabilities or who are less able to stand, saying "Please offer me a seat", are also being trialled.

Vaughan Bell (@vaughanbell)
Some irresponsible fool trying to undermine the fabric of society by encouraging talking on the London Underground https://t.co/kg2mBaOGoD

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'Tube chat' campaign provokes horror among London commuters

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The perception of the London commuter as an unfriendly curmudgeon has been bolstered by the mixed reaction to a mystery campaign to encourage tube passengers to chat. Badges emblazoned with the question "Tube chat?" have been distributed on the London Underground network, to the horror of some regular users.

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Introductory article for Sassen's book-length work on the global city.

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Brilliant series of case studies on a range of cities from around the world.

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The story of cities | Cities | The Guardian

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To complement our 50-part series on the history of urbanisation, our readers shared fascinating stories of the cities we didn't cover - from Bergamo to Isfahan

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In July 1931, Ibragim Akhmetzyanov arrived in Magnitogorsk in a wooden boxcar with his wife and eight children. The sight that greeted them was bleak.

In the middle of the frigid, windswept steppe, a cluster of tents and ramshackle barracks stood at the foot of the ominous "Magnetic Mountain", a landform so full of iron ore that compasses could not function near it and birds avoided flying over it.

Between the mountain and the shallow Ural River, workers were erecting the crown jewel of the Soviet leader's first Five-Year Plan, the Stalin Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Complex - one of the largest steel plants in the world.

The "first builders" of Magnitogorsk have been lauded in poetry, film and song; Soviet propaganda stressed the contribution of young communist volunteers and members of the Komsomol, a national youth movement that started largely in Magnitogorsk.

But Akhmetzyanov was not a volunteer. He was a dispossessed peasant who had been kicked off his farm in Tatarstan by the communist authorities and sent to Magnitogorsk, where he and his family were forced to work and live in a settlement surrounded by guards and barbed wire. It was the forced labour of these so-called "special resettlers" that made the record-quick construction of the plant possible.

They lived in tents for the autumn, then an earth-floored barrack through the harsh winter and hot summer, without basic amenities or medical care. According to Akhmetzyanov's grandson Salavat, a historian who recently wrote a book about these special resettlers, 10,000 people died of hunger, cold and disease in the first five years of construction, including a son and daughter born to Ibragim and his wife.

"The story of thousands of resettlers has been forgotten," Akhmetzyanov says. "When it comes to the war we don't hide our losses and retreats, but here, on the topic of the 1930s, they've been tiptoed around."

"If the regime had been interested in the people, the city would have built on less aggressive deadlines, and without the colossal amount of human casualties," says Gennady Vasilyev, a local history teacher who compiles "books of memory" with the names of Magnitogorsk residents who suffered from Soviet repressions. "We have a saying that the victors aren't judged, but this we do need to judge."

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Gennady Vasilyev compiles 'books of memory'. Photograph: Alec Luhn

Celebrated as the "steel heart of the motherland", Magnitogorsk is a city that has yet to face down its past - and not just the history of the forced labour during its construction. Decades of heavy industry have polluted the air and water, but few questions are asked of the now privately owned Magnitogorsk Iron and Steelworks (MMK). More than 30,000 of the city's 400,000 residents still work at MMK, and with official unemployment at only 1.44%, the city hasn't suffered the urban blight of other run-down factory towns.

Magnitogorsk lies near the northern edge of the steppe: the tawny, featureless grasslands that extend west toward the Volga River and east into nearby Kazakhstan. Many people commute from Europe to Asia for work each day, travelling from the residential western side of the Ural River to the steel mill on the eastern side. A small Cossack fort was founded here in 1743, but the area remained mostly untouched by the outside world until the "year of the great break" in 1929, when the Bolsheviks made it the focal point of their first five-year plan to pull the still largely agrarian Soviet Union into the industrial age.

Iron and steel became the watchwords of the era. "We are becoming a country of metal," Stalin declared, and this metal was to be forged in Magnitogorsk. It became the very embodiment of the push to create an industrialised, socialist society.

"Magnitogorsk was no mere business for generating profits; it was a device for transforming the country: its geography, its industry, and above all its people," historian Stephen Kotkin writes in his book Magnetic Mountain. "Magnitogorsk was the October revolution itself, the socialist revolution, Stalin's revolution."

Ironically, to make this socialist revolution, the Soviet Union had to call on its capitalist rival, hiring the American firm Arthur McKee & Co in 1930 to design the steel plant and train Soviet engineers to build it. Magnitogorsk was reportedly inspired by the US Steel plant in Gary, Indiana, then the largest in the world. The first years of construction, however, were chaos, as the impossibly short deadlines set by Moscow collided with the total lack of infrastructure, chronic fires and a shortage of skilled workers and equipment.

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Magnitogorsk department store, 1959: 'The city was an urban planning catastrophe with the chaotic outlaw atmosphere of a frontier town.' Photograph: vk.com/magnitogorskoldfoto

Magnitogorsk's builders staged "socialist competitions" to complete tasks on unbelievably tight deadlines. The results were rarely of top quality: a competition between teams on the left and right banks of the river in 1930 produced a dam that wasn't deep enough, and was eventually submerged by a larger one. But the main thing was that another victory could be chalked up to the Bolshevik project, and workers were filled with "labour enthusiasm", as Kotkin reports.

All the labour enthusiasm in the world couldn't keep workers amid the harsh conditions, however, and tens of thousands fled. The state solved this labour shortage through a campaign to dispossess allegedly wealthy "kulak" peasants of their land, which began in 1930 and expanded in 1931.

The first boxcars of "special resettlers" arrived in Magnitogorsk in May 1931. According to Vasilyev, 40,000 families of dispossessed peasants were sent to the Chelyabinsk region, many of them Turkish-speaking Tatars and mostly to Magnitogorsk. Their "special" settlements, encircled in barbed wire, were Magnitogorsk's own small islands in the vast "Gulag archipelago" of labour camps described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. In addition, more than 26,000 non-political convicts had been sent to Magnitogorsk by the end of 1933.

The overcrowded, mostly dirt-floored tents and ramshackle barracks in which early residents lived were buffeted by blizzards in the winter and dust storms in the summer. Rats, bed bugs and lice tormented their occupants. Other newcomers reverted to rural ways, building mud huts dug deep into the ground.

Crowded, cold, filthy conditions, combined with the lack of clean water and scarcity of food and medical care, resulted in epidemics of typhus, malaria and scarlet fever. Meanwhile, party officials enjoyed a comparatively luxurious life in the wooded "American town" that was originally built for specialists from the United States in 1930.

"Special carts went around the barracks and asked, 'Do you have any dead today?' And everyday they took bodies," Akhmetzyanov says of the winter of 1931. "Children died first of all, and the elderly."

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A monument commemorating Magnitogorsk's contribution to victory in the second world war. Photograph: Alec Luhn for the Guardian

While the existence of the special resettlers isn't denied, it's not readily discussed either, and a recent drive to put up a monument to them has yet to bear fruit. The administration of one district barred Vasilyev from speaking with descendants there, and he can't find a sponsor to publish his books on a larger scale. Even today, the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steelworks website makes no mention of this forced labour on its history page.

"We need to immerse children in this topic; they are the ancestors, they should know who they are," Vasilyev says. "The subtitle of each of my books is, 'This should never happen again.'"

"People say, 'Why dig this up, even if it's true?'" Akhmetzyanov explains. "The problem is that no one is giving money; all the study of these topics is done on [researchers'] own funds."

The 'socialist city'

The factory was erected in record time thanks to the first builders' labour. On 31 January 1932, in temperatures below -20 degrees, blast furnace number one was blown in; the following year, it had to be shut down again and completely rebuilt.

Although officials were reluctant to allocate labour or resources away from the factory, a city still had to be built around it. According to a 1930 Magnitostroi propaganda pamphlet, the city would be the centre of a "deep inculcation of the new socialist way of life". To this end, it was to be the world's first completely planned city.

In 1930, Moscow enlisted the help of German architect Ernst May, who had won acclaim building egalitarian housing settlements in Frankfurt with standardised, prefabricated materials. May drafted a plan for a linear city, with a green belt between bands of residential and industrial areas. But when he arrived on site in October 1930, May found that not only was the designated site unsuitable for his plan, but that local officials had already begun construction.

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Inside the MMK iron and steel works; more than 30,000 of Magnitogorsk's 400,000 residents still work here. Photograph: Gerd Ludwig/Corbis

The supposedly highly planned building process turned out to be highly erratic. Constrained by the existing construction and the factory facilities, May built what has become known as the , or "socialist city"; a superblock of rectangular three- and four-storey flat buildings, south of the factory.

The large open areas in between the buildings - designed on May's principle that every resident should have the maximum amount of light - are not well-adapted to the local climate, exposing all who come and go to the bitterly cold winds of the Ural steppe. Although the buildings are run-down, flats here are still in demand today, since they are constructed of brick rather than concrete panels like many later flat blocks. The site has now been proposed for Unesco World Heritage status.

At the time, May's standardised, unembellished buildings were criticised as too plain. When commissar of industry Sergo Ordzhonikidze visited the site in 1933, he was disgusted by May's superblock, which due to the lack of plumbing was surrounded by smelly outhouses, declaring, "You have named some manure a socialist city." He ordered residential construction to be moved to the west bank of the river, but amid the vagaries of the Soviet leadership - not even the smallest decisions could be made without Moscow's approval - a masterplan for this second attempt at a socialist city was slow to emerge.

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Photo project by local newspaper Magnitogorsk Metal. Photograph: Alec Luhn

Meanwhile, settlements of rickety barracks kept springing up next to each new enterprise that was built on the east bank, earning names such as "Fertiliser Settlement," "Ore-Enriching Station" and "Lattice-Wood Town", and stretching the city out more than 12 miles from north to south. The start of the first streetcar in 1935, bearing a portrait of Stalin - Magnitogorsk would eventually have the largest streetcar network in the country after Leningrad - was not enough to make up for the lack of paved roads and vehicles. By 1939 Magnitogorsk, already a city of 200,000, still had only one temporary hospital, and robberies were common. Far from a well-designed socialist city, this was an urban planning catastrophe with the chaotic outlaw atmosphere of a frontier town.

On the other hand, the housing and social services, while always too scarce, began to establish a more collectivised way of life, with public baths, laundries, cafeterias and nurseries. Along with the landmark Magnit cinema, a dozen workers' clubs with libraries, games, movie projectors and study circles were built to try to broaden the cultural horizons of the poorly educated masses, while also teaching them the Soviet creed.

This Soviet urban ideal was eventually realised on the west bank of the river, with its wide prospects, squares and promenades, and abundance of five-storey "Khrushchev" flat blocks, laid out on a grid and connected to the factory side by streetcars and four major bridges. Today, property prices on the east side, which is where the wind blows the bulk of the factory's emissions, are lower, and flat blocks there are generally in worse condition.

But the bulk of the west bank construction had to wait until after the second world war. Of 56,000 men in Magnitogorsk, more than 30,000 were sent to the front, with women taking their places in the factory.

"They worked at the factory as if they were on the front. My grandmother said sometimes they slept at the factory and didn't go home," remembers local activist Vyacheslav Gutnikov, whose grandmother worked in the coke-chemical section of the steel mill - known as the "hell division" because of the harmful gases.

Magnitogorsk's role in the war is commemorated by the town's main monument overlooking the river, "Homefront to the Front": a 50-foot bronze sculpture of a worker handing a giant sword to a Soviet soldier. Locals are still fond of bragging that every second tank and every third shell during the conflict was built with Magnitogorsk steel.

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Story of cities #20: the secret history of Magnitogorsk, Russia's steel city

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In July 1931, Ibragim Akhmetzyanov arrived in Magnitogorsk in a wooden boxcar with his wife and eight children. The sight that greeted them was bleak. In the middle of the frigid, windswept steppe, a cluster of tents and ramshackle barracks stood at the foot of the ominous "Magnetic Mountain", a landform so full of iron ore that compasses could not function near it and birds avoided flying over it.

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The term narcotecture often refers to grand mansions built with drug money. A blend of the words ‘‘narcotics’’ and ‘‘architecture,’’ the portmanteau evokes florid gated communities in Afghanistan, Africa, and the Americas. Yet, this interest in ostentation strips narcotecture of full analytical purchase. To expand the term’s significance, this article samples how the global drug trade interacts every day with the War on Drugs at the level of built environments. This interaction makes flashy mansions, to be sure, but also airplane hangars and shipping containers, security booths and watch towers, drop sites and crack houses—not to mention prisons, hospitals, and barracks. This broader notion of narcotecture is organized by the tactical manipulation of space pursued in ways that self-consciously attempt to avoid detection. This article’s central claim is that narcotecture is not simply a form of conspicuous consumption but more importantly a mode of inconspicuous construction.

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Lucy Hershman - Sky-high London rents prompt calls for new controls on landlords

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Lucy Hershman - Sky-high London rents prompt calls for new controls on landlords

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London has become one of the most expensive cities in the world to rent a home, prompting politicians to call for New York-style controls on landlords.

In 18 of London's 33 boroughs, the median rent for a one-bedroom flat is more than £1,000 a month, statistics from the government agency that values properties for the purposes of council tax in England and Wales show.

In Greater London, the rent for a one-bedroom flat has risen by an average of 22% over the past five years, the Valuation Office Agency data reveals.

The figures have prompted David Lammy, one of Labour's prospective candidates for London mayor and the MP for Tottenham, to warn that the capital risks civil unrest similar to that in the ghettoised suburbs of Paris unless rent controls are imposed.

Rent controls - or rent stabilisation, as it is referred to in New York - are not caps on monthly rent: they are usually restrictions on in-contract rent increases and lease conditions, such as length of tenancy. This prevents landlords pushing rents up to overheated levels.

"I worry about London," Lammy says. "If we don't do something about this, we are going to be like the Parisian banlieue, where you have squalid accommodation outside the centre, a rise in rioting and chronic and endemic hardship."

The Valuation Office Agency figures show rents for a one-bedroom flat in Greenwich, south-east London, have risen by up to 30% over five years - from a median of £750 a month to £975. In Islington, in north London, rent for a one-bedroom flat has gone up by 20% over the same period, from £1,213 to £1,452.

In all but four London boroughs, the median rent for a two-bedroom flat is more than £1,100 a month.

The gap between what Londoners should pay - economists most commonly say 30% of their salary - and what they actually pay is among the highest in the world, according to a report by McKinsey Global Institute. Anecdotal evidence suggests many Londoners are paying at least half their salary in rent.

Laura and her partner tell first hand of the consequences of rent inflation. Their joint income was not enough to enable them to continue renting in Hackney after their two children were born. Laura and the children have now moved to Nottingham to live with her father, while her partner rents a room in London from Monday to Saturday and sees his children one day a week.

"I've been in London for 14 years and have this sense of failure that we didn't manage to do it," Laura says. "I still come down to London for work. I hear mums in the playground saying with the tax credits going they will struggle. These are people you might think on the outside are privileged, they work in the creative industry and they feel they have to keep up. But people keep it in, like this dirty secret."

NHS worker Janey Galloway said her rent covers 90% of her salary. "I don't earn enough to get a mortgage and I can't afford to move, and social housing waiting lists are approximately four years. I'm basically trapped," she said.

To rent in Bexley, the cheapest of London's suburbs, a nurse or teaching assistant on a salary of £19,700 a year with monthly take-home pay of £1,373 would be looking at paying £700 a month for a one-bedroom flat, according to the Valuation Office Agency data - 50% of their pay.

Go north to Barnet and the rent rises to 75% of take-home pay, while the rent in Camden would leave a teaching assistant in debt.

Rent control is unpopular among Conservative politicians. Zac Goldsmith declined to respond to the Guardian's questions, but Andrew Boff, the Tory's mayoral candidate and the party's housing expert, believes that rather than stabilise rents, affordable housing should be built for social and private renters, regardless of their income.

"Every rental story is a horror story. The housing problems are so severe, more than we have ever seen in London's history," says Boff. He cites an innovative solution that he thinks should be copied across the capital: Barking and Dagenham council has created 477 homes open to anyone at 65% or 80% of market rent.

Separate data from 2014, supplied by City Hall, shows that London is becoming like New York and Berlin, where the majority of homes are rented. In the early 1960s, 36% of Londoners owned their homes, the data shows. The figure peaked at 59% at the turn of the century, but by 2011 fell below 50%.

Sarah Hayward, Camden council's Labour leader, who commissioned a report from the London School of Economics and Political Science on the global renting experience, argues that unless fair rent, as opposed to market rent, becomes the norm, the capital will "lose its soul".

"I am really worried about the future of London," Hayward says. "One of our selling points is that London offers diversity. It's edgy, it's cultured, it's intellectual, it's artsy, it's fashion as well as business."

* This article was amended on 20 August 2015 to remove personal details at the request of one of the interviewees.
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Sky-high London rents prompt calls for new controls on landlords

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London has become one of the most expensive cities in the world to rent a home, prompting politicians to call for New York-style controls on landlords. In 18 of London's 33 boroughs, the median rent for a one-bedroom flat is more than £1,000 a month, statistics from the government agency that values properties for the purposes of council tax in England and Wales show.

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Alexandra Harman- For better or for worse?

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Alexandra Harman- For better or for worse?

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As part of a multi-million pound project deprived areas such as Millbrook and Townhill will feel the effects of knocking down existing houses to erect about 500 new homes in the form of tower blocks, shops and public spaces. One of the major green areas to be shut down will be Green Park. Is removing most of the green space and in its place constructing more large tower blocks of flats really what deprived areas like Millbrook need? NO.

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CIVIC chiefs have unveiled a bold blueprint to transform a Southampton community over the next decade.

Up to 500 new homes, shops and public space could be built as part of a major multi-million pound project that will overhaul large parts of Millbrook, Redbridge and Maybush.

Council chiefs say the proposals are at a very early stage, but could be the first in a line of projects to regenerate estates across Southampton.

However the plans have already proven controversial, with proposals to build homes over the site of sports fields criticised, and opposition councillors calling the proposals "second rate".

Letters were sent out to 800 residents in Millbrook and Maybush last month to inform them about the proposals, with the council collecting consultation results before firm plans are put together.

Their blueprint currently contains the potential for 500 new homes, some for rent and others for sale.

New shops, sports areas, play spaces and road improvements could also be carried out as part of the proposals.

One part of the proposals would be to build about 140 new homes in five apartment blocks at the southern end of Green Park.

One football pitch would make way for the houses, but the council says new pitches and games areas could be created at the park.

The area around Millbrook Tower could be set for a make-over, with a new public square created around the tower and up to 230 new homes built in the surrounding area.

Eighty-five existing homes would have to make way for the mixture of houses, maisonettes and apartments, while new parking areas and green space would be created at Lulworth Close.

Existing shops would be knocked down and moved into new buildings, with the council stressing that new buildings will be created before old ones are demolished.

Twenty-nine homes in Kendal Avenue would be demolished to make way for a mixture of 80 new apartments and maisonettes, and current shops would be replaced before being knocked down.

Redbridge Hill could be set for a major overhaul which would see 40 new apartments and houses built on either side of the road and the road layout improved.

And seven houses could be created along Wimpson Lane on the site of green verges.

The council says at least one new parking space would be provided for each new home, and trees would be planted along many roads to improve the environment.

Work could also see green verges turned into parking bays, cycle routes, footpaths and roads improved and new safe crossing areas added.

The project could then be followed by projects to regenerate parts of Northam, Thornhill, Weston and Holyrood.

But Conservative opposition deputy leader Jeremy Moulton has criticised the plans as being "second-rate" and not as ambitious as the major regeneration of Townhill Park estate initiated under his party's term in office.

He said: "It's a case of tarting up, a bit of paint here and there and building on green spaces - what it isn't is a proper regeneration of the estate.

"What we would like to see is buildings that are well past their sell-by date torn down and replaced by high quality developments that will provide better design and more homes."

The proposals to build on the football pitch at Green Park has been criticised, with Cllr Moulton adding: "It's ridiculous - there's huge demand for football pitches on Sundays and there's not enough, so building on pitches is simply crazy."

And Southampton Sunday Football League secretary Hazel Andrews said: "I don't think it's a good idea to build homes on playing pitches.

"They are meant to be trying to encourage people to play sport, not shut pitches down so they can't play."

Labour council housing chief Warwick Payne said the council will pick which ideas to continue with based on the response from residents.

He said: "The council hasn't tied itself to any proposals yet, so if something's popular we'll take it forward, and if it isn't, we'll take it out.

"Feedback from residents will be crucial as there's no point spending large sums of money without their support, and that's why the consultation is important."

Responding to Cllr Moulton's criticism, he said the net gain of new properties would be as much as 385, compared to 240 in Townhill Park, adding: "Given that this would be the largest net gain of new homes on any Southampton council estate for more than a generation, Tory accusations of the plans not being ambitious enough look ill-informed.

"It also suggests the dividing line between the two parties is that Labour wants to maximise new homes for Southampton families, while the Tories' measure of success is how much council housing they can wipe off the map."

Eugene McManus, landlord of The Saints pub and chairman of the Redbridge Residents' Association, said: "I think they are trying to be too ambitious - I don't believe there is enough space to fit in these houses."

But Mo Simmons, block representative for residents at Millbrook Tower, said: "I think the area does need this work. People say to me that if you go to other areas of the city they look lovely, but come to Millbrook and you have a dump."

A council spokesman said no costs have been confirmed, although most of it will be funded through the authority's housing revenue account, which is funded by council housing rent and other income.

There is no current timetable for any work, but the council has said no-one will have to move out of their home in either 2014 or 2015.

You can obtain consultation forms online at southampton.gov.uk or at the Civic Centre, and can return them by emailing Housing.DeliveryandRenewal@southampton.gov.uk or posting them to Housing Delivery and Renewal, Southampton City Council, Ground Floor, Civic Centre, Southampton, SO14 7LY. The deadline is September 30.

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500 new homes as part of estate regeneration

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CIVIC chiefs have unveiled a bold blueprint to transform a Southampton community over the next decade. Up to 500 new homes, shops and public space could be built as part of a major multi-million pound project that will overhaul large parts of Millbrook, Redbridge and Maybush.

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Chloe Walker - Designing out crime and disorder in cities through architecture

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Chloe Walker - Designing out crime and disorder in cities through architecture

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The Guardian article discusses how the layout and structure of a city can have an impact on the amount of crime or disorder there. Architects in Copenhagen make an attempt to drive out crime through open spaces and a complete lack of CCTV surveillance creating an open, trusting and welcoming environment.

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Halfway along the Oresund Bridge where Denmark meets Sweden, one of the darkest of Scandinavian crime dramas placed a body, cut in two and left lying across the border.

Such is the penetration of Nordic noir into our consciousness that even driving the route on a bright summer day, with the five-mile structure glinting in the sunlight, you are thrust back into those bleak scenes featuring the socially awkward Saga Norén and her Danish sidekick Martin Rohde. As the pair pursued a perpetrator whose killing spree put Hannibal Lector in the shade, The Bridge explored extreme violence, political activism and social dysfunction in both nations.

Travelling from Denmark to the point where the body was discovered, the city of Malmo is visible through the windscreen as Copenhagen recedes in the rear-view mirror. While dramatists linked the two cities around an outbreak of violence that seemed to suggest something deeply wrong at the root of both societies, it is not a tendency to breed serial killers that the cities share, but an ambition to drive out crime by injecting the ideas of an open, democratic and empathetic society into the very bricks and mortar that surround its citizens.

In the UK the authorities have tended to adopt a hostile and defensive architectural response to crime and anti-social behaviour: the erection of thousands of CCTV cameras, provision of gated communities and, most recently, the use of metal spikes in the streets. But in Scandinavia, despite higher rates of homicide and assaults than the UK, according to OECD figures, this approach has been rejected in favour of a softer option.

The results can be seen in developments like the one in the southern harbour area of Copenhagen, Sluseholmen - once a working-class dock - which has been regenerated around a canal system in a deliberate copy of Amsterdam. Low-rise modern flats with large windows and private balconies or gardens have been built around inner courtyards. Fences are replaced with glass and perspex, encouraging light to bounce off the surfaces, and increasing visibility of the families looking out on to the square and neighbours looking in. The aim is to use the natural surveillance of the residents as a powerful form of crime prevention.

In the middle of the courtyard, a children's play area is well used. Toys lie scattered around, and babies sleep in prams around the edge of the space. The canals flow up the sides and back of the buildings, and the blocks look out on to the harbour itself. Bikes and kayaks - used by the residents to get to work in central Copenhagen - are left unlocked. There are no dark alleys or dead ends, and the atmosphere is open, calming and welcoming. Most strikingly for a visitor from the UK, there is not one CCTV camera.

Walking around Sluseholmen is the architect Bo Grönlund. In his mid-70s, a small, energetic white-haired man, his enthusiasm about the impact architects can have on reducing crime is no less today than when he was a young man. Eyes bright with zeal, Grönlund talks rapidly, gesticulating at architectural features in the area which, he says, make residents safer.

"The water is used here," he gesticulates, "as a natural defence. You see how it is all along one side of the building - no one can break in from there. It is built around the courtyard principle where you have a public space in the interior. The car park is underground and not visible. There are no cameras here, of course. We are quite sceptical about them because they can almost only be used after a crime has taken place; they do not prevent it.

"This is a calming environment, it is not provocative. If you do things that tell you that you are a bad person - like have cameras or gates everywhere - you might become that bad person, at least a little bit."

Grönlund was part of a group of architects in the 1980s who tried to put designing out crime at the heart of city planning. They drew up recommendations to give planners and designers a better chance of shaping the physical environment to minimise violence and vandalism. "At the time the only publication around crime prevention from the EU was a British one, and it was very British in its thinking: with fences, cameras and alarms," he said. "We wanted to do it in another way very consciously. The basis was that Denmark should continue to be an open society with a minimum of physical barring and formal surveillance."

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The 1980s Sibelius estate is considered a model of how to design out crime. Photograph: Bo Grönlund

A leading figure in the movement, architect John Allpass, was responsible for designing the first housing area in Denmark where creating safety and security was implicit in the design. Five miles out of Copenhagen, the Sibelius estate is still considered a model of the designing out crime philosophy, shaped around:

Creating a social space where the natural surveillance of the people within it prevents crime.

Increasing people's attachment to an area.

Encouraging people to use common areas with seating, foyers and lobbies that invite social contact.

Providing facilities for adults and young people in particular.

Limiting the number of access points from surrounding streets.

Frequent inspection and repair of vandalism.

Avoiding alleyways, hiding places and blind spots, and only using locks cameras and physical barriers as a last resort.

Bronzed and relaxed, Karsten Ellekaer is a familiar figure on the estate. He arrived here in 1985, shortly after the first phase was completed, with a young child. He brought up his family here and, though recently retired, has no intention of living anywhere else.

"Why would I want to leave? This is a wonderful place to live," he says. "We have very little crime here. From the start everything was built in a certain way. The idea is the buildings are placed in the middle of an industrial area, which means that tenants can keep an eye on the industrial units at night, and when the tenants are out at work, there are people working in the industries who can act as a natural surveillance for the properties here."

There is a bar run by tenants, a cafe, a laundry - where cards are swiped rather than cash used - a fitness centre and a common house which tenants can hire for parties. Neatly tended private gardens, with low hedges to increase visibility, line an inner road through the estate which is used by pedestrians, cyclists and drivers. The passage of people is another intended form of 'eyes on the street' surveillance to reduce crime.

Ellekaer spends his days walking around the estate checking for graffiti, litter, signs of criminal damage. As the tenants' association leader, he runs a team of caretakers who are busy weeding the verges alongside the interior road. On the basis of the 'broken windows' theory - that vandalism and graffiti, if left, can escalate into more serious crime - so maintenance is deemed to be part of increasing safety and security.

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Sibelius in Copenhagen takes maintenance seriously. Photograph: Bo Grönlund

But there are no CCTV cameras or warning signs banning skateboarding, littering or anti-social behaviour. "They are not necessary," Ellekaer says.

Behind the high-wire fence of the national police headquarters a few miles away, Karsten Nielsen, a former police officer, sits in his small prefab office which is dwarfed by the police station opposite. A quiet and thoughtful man, he leads the Danish Crime Prevention Council and believes there is a vital philosophy behind his country's desire to make its people feel safe without locking them in. The Sibelius estate, he says, brought together all the best ideas of building secure and safe environments.

"We want a society we live in to be a free, open society, and we don't want to lock any gates or make barriers unless it is absolutely necessary," he says. "It's about creating safety and reducing crime through urban planning in the built environment, on the streets, in the living areas we create. It relates to all major crime categories like theft and burglary, vandalism and violence."

But attempts to remodel Sibelius have not all been successful; some designs have created public spaces which are too large for the population - lending the feel of a suburb so deserted it feels like the aftermath of a nuclear attack. There is also, in some areas, a sense that the life has been designed away, leaving only a husk of anything that makes a city interesting to live in.

"You cannot have a completely safe city and a completely exciting city at the same time, they are completely contradictory," Grönlund suggests. "You need to have the exciting part of the city which is perhaps somewhat dangerous. So it has to be balanced and in proportion."

Look at any guidebook and one of the most "exciting, vibrant and cosmopolitan" areas of inner-Copenhagen is Norrebro, where nearly 30% of inhabitants are from immigrant communities and the organic cafes, bars and chic baby shops rub up against cheap kebab takeaways, pound shops and slightly seedy clubs.

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Graffiti at Norrebro station in Copenhagen. Photograph: Francis Dean/Rex

Norrebro - according to police statistics - also has a higher rate of crime than many other areas of Copenhagen, with 2,200 crimes reported per square kilometre. These include gang-related activities including drug dealing, possession of weapons and robberies, as well as shop burglaries, vandalism and graffiti.

Daubed with the graffiti of rival gangs along its main streets, the area has been the scene of many riots over the years, most recently in 2007 when the police moved in and evicted squatters from the Youth House, a social centre and base for environmental activists. Now it is the subject of a detailed report by Grönlund into how to alter the environment in order to reduce the crime. "Obviously it is [only] small changes you can make; you cannot pull everything down and start again. It is about working with the buildings and making adjustments."

Some in Norrebro, however, fear that an attempt to design out the crime on their streets could eradicate the very reasons they live here - its radical edge, multiculturalism and all-round funkiness.

Young people gather around cafe tables in the main square, where plant shops vie for space with juice bars and vegetarian restaurants. "There are some gangs here and there is drug dealing, but I don't feel this is a dangerous place at all," says Hanne Kold, who runs a baby shop in the square.

"A lot of people who hang around come here because they need somewhere to go; they are part of this place," Kold adds. "They don't make too much trouble because this is their place too. I wouldn't want this area being changed in some major way - I don't see why they should want to do that."

* Inside Rio's James Bond-style control centre
Topics

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Designing out crime in Scandinavia: 'Cities cannot be completely safe and completely exciting at the same time'

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Halfway along the Oresund Bridge where Denmark meets Sweden, one of the darkest of Scandinavian crime dramas placed a body, cut in two and left lying across the border.

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Jess Hudson - How can we improve living conditions in slums? Lessons from Bangkok, Lima and Ahmedabad

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Jess Hudson - How can we improve living conditions in slums? Lessons from Bangkok, Lima and Ahmedabad

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About a billion people live in precarious conditions in slum areas around the world – about a third of the urban population of the developing world, and a number that’s forecast to treble by 2030. Increasing urbanisation in developing countries is putting pressure on the provision of basic services and housing, a challenge that governments around the world cannot afford to ignore. 1. Leadership and political will go a long way in delivering change 2. Slum communities themselves are pivotal to improving their own living conditions. 3. Ensure that additional and affordable land and housing are available for growing low-income communities

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Last weekend, the London commuter rail network coughed, spluttered and attempted to morph into a new shape, as Thameslink marched triumphantly into territory. It didn't go very well, at first, but it seems to be bedding in.

Something that baffled me about this expansion while I was liveblogging on Monday was that the official maps had been oddly silent on the fact it was happening. Thameslink got its grubby tentacles onto routes to Dartford, Cambridge and Peterborough for the first time on Sunday - but that day I could find no map acknowledging the fact at either London Bridge or St Pancras International. The relevant authorities didn't update their maps online, either: for three days, Thameslink was operating a rail service that seemed not to officially exist.

Until today.

There are two official maps of the region's rail network: the " London's Rail & Tube Services" map, which shows Greater London and a few stations just beyond its boundaries, and is a joint production between Transport for London (TfL) and National Rail (NR); and the London & the "South East RAIL SERVICES" (yes, with that capitalisation) map, produced by NR alone. Both of these have been updated to reflect the new service patterns

And the results are bleedin' 'orrible.

Let's do the latter first. Several things are bugging me. Firstly, there's this bit...

...which highlights the weirdness of the new Thameslink service pattern. Effectively, it's swallowed the mid-range Great Northern services, while leaving the original train operating company (TOC) with the long distance ones (fast trains to Cambridge, then stopping to Kings Lynn) and the suburban ones (basically, as far as Stevenage). Those two things would not, in a rational world, go together.

Then there's the problem of some services only operating in peak hours. Like the bits to East Grinstead and Littlehampton:

Euch.

Both of these are sort of the result of a single fiction: that Govia Thameslink is four separate companies, when really it's one. Southern, Thameslink, Great Northern and Gatwick Express are all actually run by the same company under different branding. All that happens in peak hours is that some trains that normally terminate on the southern fringes of the city will continue across London and pretend to be run by a different company rather than exactly the same company as before.

I'm not honestly sure what the solution is - I'm not sure colouring all four as if they were a single thing would be any better, really. My suspicion is that a large part of the problem comes from pretending that operator is more important than route when, unless you happen to work in the marketing team of a TOC, it very obviously isn't.

At any rate: the status quo feels strange and ugly and I don't like it. So there.

Talking of which, here's a problem that's been bugging me for a while:

What does that beige box around London represent? It's shaped a bit like the M25, London's orbital motorway, but it isn't that at all: if it were, a much bigger chunk of Surrey would be inside. Nor is it the area in which you can use Oyster: that extends to Cheshunt, Brentwood and Gatwick Airport. The legend suggests it's there to mark out TfL's domain - but that doesn't make sense either, because it's missing chunk of that, too.

You know what it is? I'll tell you what it is. Stupid, that's what it is.

Anyway, let's dive into the stupid and look at the other map.

It's worse. It's much, much worse.

For one thing, what's going on here?

Click to expand.

As far as I can tell, new Thameslink services run to Cambridge and Peterborough all day, but those aren't really suburban services: the only place they stop in non-central London is Finsbury Park. That, I suspect, explains the weird, aggravating gap between the purple (Thameslink) and gold (Great Northern) lines as the former runs through Harringay.

But then it starts hugging its little brother more tightly - because there's also a stopping service to Welwyn Garden City. That doesn't stop at Hadley Wood, though you have to look pretty closely to see it.

One oddity about that route: it only runs at peak hours. The map doesn't bother to say this. I think that's what the weird, ugly spur to Kings Cross is in aid of, but it's very far from clear.

Elsewhere there's this:

Which shows that the new Thameslink stopping service on the North Kent lines, which stops everywhere except Woolwich Dockyard, Belvedere and Erith, like some kind of metropolitan snob.

Then there's this:

What are they trying to communicate with the profusion of lines out of London Bridge there? Because I haven't the foggiest.

Away from Thameslink there's the various C2C back up routes, shown as a hollow pink line. These mostly run during engineering work and probably aren't needed on the map at all, but if you have to show them do you have to show them like this?

What on earth is going on there?

On this map, too, there are ugly things that have always been there, but which I'm only really noticing now I'm looking closely at this. Check this out:

You wouldn't know that the light green line is following exactly the same route as the orange one, would you?

There's something similar out by Heathrow:

This would be bad enough but just about excusable as a way of showing that Heathrow Express fares are outside the normal zonal fare system and so expensive - except that the excellent Diamond Geezer blog recently noted that TfL Rail fares to Heathrow are going to be bloody expensive too and they're still in there. It's a mess.

Some, though by no means all, of these problems have a similar source to those on the London South East map. Once upon a time, the London rail map coloured its routes by terminus, which made some sense: you could see the shape of the network. Then National Rail - which had previously produced its own version - got involved in TfL's one, and because NR is an umbrella body for the TOCs it wanted the lines coded by operator rather than route. The result was this monstrosity.

I don't know what the solution to these problems are either. I was staring open-mouthed at the new map at Marylebone earlier, trying to come up with one, when a kindly station assistant asked if I was alright. When I said I was just looking at the new map because it was horrible she said, "I know. And they've got the wrong colour for the Jubilee on the tube map", and do you know they did? But I forgot to take a photo.

Anyway, it was good to know it's not just me.

I should probably stop writing.

Honestly, I'm completely fine.

Jonn Elledge is the editor of CityMetric. He is on Twitter as @jonnelledge and on Facebook as JonnElledgeWrites.

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How can we improve living conditions in slums? Lessons from Bangkok, Lima and Ahmedabad

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Last weekend, the London commuter rail network coughed, spluttered and attempted to morph into a new shape, as Thameslink marched triumphantly into territory. It didn't go very well, at first, but it seems to be bedding in.

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Jess Hudson - Duck lanes introduced in canal walkways in London, Manchester and Birmingham

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Jess Hudson - Duck lanes introduced in canal walkways in London, Manchester and Birmingham

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Special lanes for ducks have been sprayed onto towpaths around the country to remind walkers, runners and cyclists that they share canals with feathered inhabitants.

Offering a respite from busy city life, canals are more popular than ever, with over 400 million people visiting the 2,000 mile network of towpaths which wind across England and Wales each year.

But as the areas become more popular, the Canal and River Trust has sprayed some paths with tiny bike-lane like roads for ducks, as part of the Share the Space, Drop Your Pace initiative.

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Special lanes for ducks have been sprayed onto towpaths around the country to remind walkers, runners and cyclists that they share canals with feathered inhabitants.

Offering a respite from busy city life, canals are more popular than ever, with over 400 million people visiting the 2,000 mile network of towpaths which wind across England and Wales each year.

But as the areas become more popular, the Canal and River Trust has sprayed some paths with tiny bike-lane like roads for ducks, as part of the Share the Space, Drop Your Pace initiative.

The walkways have been introduced in bustling cities including London, Birmingham and Manchester.

Read more: How living on a houseboat meant I didn't officially 'exist'
Feed ducks frozen peas instead of stale bread, charity asks

Richard Perry, the chief executive of the Canal and River Trust, said in a statement on the charity's website: "For many people our towpaths are among their most precious green spaces, antidotes to the pace and stress of the modern world and places to relax and unwind

"But with that success there are also problems, which is why we are calling on visitors to help make our canals preserves for old fashioned good manners! We can all help by slowing down and remembering we are all there to enjoy the space."

The duck paths have been well-received by the public, who have been sharing photos of the lanes on Twitter.

Early start on the towpath this morning installing Duck Lanes before the ducks were up! #sharethespace pic.twitter.com/gJjREj6cLL
- Kerena Fussell (@fussellface) May 18, 2015

And a form of shared space I can wholeheartedly endorse: a duck lane on the canal towpath. pic.twitter.com/XXGIrroRja
- Alix Kroeger (@AlixKroeger) May 22, 2015

There is a duck lane on the Regents Canal pic.twitter.com/7Vn8Gbu9bD
- Alice Kershaw (@AliceKershaw) May 25, 2015

London gets new highlited duck lanes. Both creative and observing to nature. I love it. #DuckLane #SharetheSpace pic.twitter.com/EyzyVSBy5J
- Patrick Gavran (@gavranovo) May 21, 2015

This is genius. #DuckLane pic.twitter.com/xqL1R2AtsH
- Patty Dick-Fingers (@TrishiWeav) May 19, 2015

As part of the initiative, the organisation has also put together the Better Towpaths for Everyone code, with the help of over 2,000 towpath visitors and interest groups.

The issues which were most frequently flagged up were: the need for improvements to the towpaths, better signage and better behaviour between visitors.

Reuse content

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There are now duck lanes in some of the UK's major cities

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Special lanes for ducks have been sprayed onto towpaths around the country to remind walkers, runners and cyclists that they share canals with feathered inhabitants. Offering a respite from busy city life, canals are more popular than ever, with over 400 million people visiting the 2,000 mile network of towpaths which wind across England and Wales each year.

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Jess Hudson - Local Authorities have been creating their own rules for public spaces

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Jess Hudson - Local Authorities have been creating their own rules for public spaces

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Last weekend, the London commuter rail network coughed, spluttered and attempted to morph into a new shape, as Thameslink marched triumphantly into territory. It didn't go very well, at first, but it seems to be bedding in.

Something that baffled me about this expansion while I was liveblogging on Monday was that the official maps had been oddly silent on the fact it was happening. Thameslink got its grubby tentacles onto routes to Dartford, Cambridge and Peterborough for the first time on Sunday - but that day I could find no map acknowledging the fact at either London Bridge or St Pancras International. The relevant authorities didn't update their maps online, either: for three days, Thameslink was operating a rail service that seemed not to officially exist.

Until today.

There are two official maps of the region's rail network: the " London's Rail & Tube Services" map, which shows Greater London and a few stations just beyond its boundaries, and is a joint production between Transport for London (TfL) and National Rail (NR); and the London & the "South East RAIL SERVICES" (yes, with that capitalisation) map, produced by NR alone. Both of these have been updated to reflect the new service patterns

And the results are bleedin' 'orrible.

Let's do the latter first. Several things are bugging me. Firstly, there's this bit...

...which highlights the weirdness of the new Thameslink service pattern. Effectively, it's swallowed the mid-range Great Northern services, while leaving the original train operating company (TOC) with the long distance ones (fast trains to Cambridge, then stopping to Kings Lynn) and the suburban ones (basically, as far as Stevenage). Those two things would not, in a rational world, go together.

Then there's the problem of some services only operating in peak hours. Like the bits to East Grinstead and Littlehampton:

Euch.

Both of these are sort of the result of a single fiction: that Govia Thameslink is four separate companies, when really it's one. Southern, Thameslink, Great Northern and Gatwick Express are all actually run by the same company under different branding. All that happens in peak hours is that some trains that normally terminate on the southern fringes of the city will continue across London and pretend to be run by a different company rather than exactly the same company as before.

I'm not honestly sure what the solution is - I'm not sure colouring all four as if they were a single thing would be any better, really. My suspicion is that a large part of the problem comes from pretending that operator is more important than route when, unless you happen to work in the marketing team of a TOC, it very obviously isn't.

At any rate: the status quo feels strange and ugly and I don't like it. So there.

Talking of which, here's a problem that's been bugging me for a while:

What does that beige box around London represent? It's shaped a bit like the M25, London's orbital motorway, but it isn't that at all: if it were, a much bigger chunk of Surrey would be inside. Nor is it the area in which you can use Oyster: that extends to Cheshunt, Brentwood and Gatwick Airport. The legend suggests it's there to mark out TfL's domain - but that doesn't make sense either, because it's missing chunk of that, too.

You know what it is? I'll tell you what it is. Stupid, that's what it is.

Anyway, let's dive into the stupid and look at the other map.

It's worse. It's much, much worse.

For one thing, what's going on here?

Click to expand.

As far as I can tell, new Thameslink services run to Cambridge and Peterborough all day, but those aren't really suburban services: the only place they stop in non-central London is Finsbury Park. That, I suspect, explains the weird, aggravating gap between the purple (Thameslink) and gold (Great Northern) lines as the former runs through Harringay.

But then it starts hugging its little brother more tightly - because there's also a stopping service to Welwyn Garden City. That doesn't stop at Hadley Wood, though you have to look pretty closely to see it.

One oddity about that route: it only runs at peak hours. The map doesn't bother to say this. I think that's what the weird, ugly spur to Kings Cross is in aid of, but it's very far from clear.

Elsewhere there's this:

Which shows that the new Thameslink stopping service on the North Kent lines, which stops everywhere except Woolwich Dockyard, Belvedere and Erith, like some kind of metropolitan snob.

Then there's this:

What are they trying to communicate with the profusion of lines out of London Bridge there? Because I haven't the foggiest.

Away from Thameslink there's the various C2C back up routes, shown as a hollow pink line. These mostly run during engineering work and probably aren't needed on the map at all, but if you have to show them do you have to show them like this?

What on earth is going on there?

On this map, too, there are ugly things that have always been there, but which I'm only really noticing now I'm looking closely at this. Check this out:

You wouldn't know that the light green line is following exactly the same route as the orange one, would you?

There's something similar out by Heathrow:

This would be bad enough but just about excusable as a way of showing that Heathrow Express fares are outside the normal zonal fare system and so expensive - except that the excellent Diamond Geezer blog recently noted that TfL Rail fares to Heathrow are going to be bloody expensive too and they're still in there. It's a mess.

Some, though by no means all, of these problems have a similar source to those on the London South East map. Once upon a time, the London rail map coloured its routes by terminus, which made some sense: you could see the shape of the network. Then National Rail - which had previously produced its own version - got involved in TfL's one, and because NR is an umbrella body for the TOCs it wanted the lines coded by operator rather than route. The result was this monstrosity.

I don't know what the solution to these problems are either. I was staring open-mouthed at the new map at Marylebone earlier, trying to come up with one, when a kindly station assistant asked if I was alright. When I said I was just looking at the new map because it was horrible she said, "I know. And they've got the wrong colour for the Jubilee on the tube map", and do you know they did? But I forgot to take a photo.

Anyway, it was good to know it's not just me.

I should probably stop writing.

Honestly, I'm completely fine.

Jonn Elledge is the editor of CityMetric. He is on Twitter as @jonnelledge and on Facebook as JonnElledgeWrites.

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Local authorities have been creating their own rules for public spaces, and some of them seem a little extreme

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Last weekend, the London commuter rail network coughed, spluttered and attempted to morph into a new shape, as Thameslink marched triumphantly into territory. It didn't go very well, at first, but it seems to be bedding in.

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Some of the slums or 'favelas' in Rio De Janeiro are being cleared ahead of the Olympics and World Cup coming, with promises of improved housing replacing them. What might this mean for the current residents of the areas? How will social cleansing of this kind affect the makeup of the city?

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The World Cup and the Olympics are being used as a pretext for "social cleansing" as tens of thousands of Rio slum dwellers are driven out to the city periphery, favela residents say.

While millions of eyes turn to north-eastern Brazil for the World Cup draw on Friday, poor communities in Rio de Janeiro are still struggling to be heard as they fight against evictions they say are related to the city's mega sporting events.

Next year, Rio will host seven games, including the final, followed in 2016 by the Olympics. The city's mayor, Eduardo Paes, describes this as an opportunity for the city to modernise and create a legacy for future generations. But many of those on the frontline of change feel they are the victims of social cleansing.

At least 19,000 families have been moved to make way for roads, renovated stadiums, an athletes' village, an ambitious redevelopment of the port area and other projects that have been launched or accelerated to prepare the city for the world's two biggest sporting events.

"The authorities wouldn't even enter our community in the past and there was no mention of moving us, but then Brazil won the right to host the World Cup and everything changed," Maria do Socorro told a hearing in the city council building this week. Socorro's home of 40 years in the Indiana favela has been marked for demolition.

Countless communities are affected. Among the best known are Vila Autódromo, which will be the site of the main Olympic stadium and athletes' village; Providência, which is close to the port redevelopment and Indiana, which is about 10 minutes' drive from the newly refurbished Maracanã stadium.

As was the case in Beijing, London and South Africa before their mega events, the government says such programmes are necessary to modernise the city. Numerous relocations have been carried out in the past as Rio has evolved, but politicians and campaigners say the forthcoming sporting events are driving the process forward at an unprecedented rate, and often in violation of the law. "The government is obliged to publicise preliminary studies, listen to the views of affected communities and offer alternative housing close to their old homes, but the Rio municipality has not complied with any of these laws," said Renato Cinco, a council member for the leftwing PSOL party.

"People are being moved more than 40km [25 miles] from their homes with very little prior notice and no compensation."

Civil society groups say the relocations are motivated by surging land values. As new infrastructure is put in place for the World Cup and Olympics, property prices rise in the surrounding areas.

"There is a process of gentrification taking place in the whole city that is connected to the sports events and how the government sees the city: it is no longer a place for residents, but as a business to sell to foreign investors. That's what the World Cup is about," said Renata Neder of Amnesty.

"There have been waves of evictions in the past, but this latest one that began after Rio was chosen to host the mega events may be the biggest one yet in terms of numbers."

The authorities insist that due process has been followed and no residents have been forcibly relocated. The Rio 2016 chief operating officer, Leo Gryner, said the high-profile case of Vila Autódromo showed how far the government was willing to go to accommodate residents.

"In Vila Autódromo the mayor said he would move people to a new place and build nice housing projects for people to move to a new area. People started protesting, saying you couldn't evict people because of the Olympics. So after some time, the city admitted they should not have forced them to go. They talked to each one of the people living in that area, roughly half said they wanted to move and the other half wanted to stay," he said.

"Then when they started to see the project going up they realised it was very nice and so they came here to demonstrate and demand to be moved to the new housing! The city talked to everyone." This is refuted by residents.

That is disputed by residents. And in less prominent cases, residents complain of being harassed by officials and engineers who tell them their homes are not safe. In some cases, this is true. Thousands have died over the years in the floods and landslides that affect many river and hillside favelas during the annual rainy season.

But a visit to the Indiana favela, which sits next to the river Maracanã, suggested the genuine threat to a handful of homes may be being used to justify the clearance of swaths of the community.

Several houses, including two wooden shacks, sat below the flood line and looked too poorly built to withstand a deluge. But the majority of homes marked for demolition - including several that had already been destroyed - were on seemingly firm concrete foundations several metres above the flood line.

"It is true that there are risks from the river, but only in certain places. The problem is that the government is arbitrarily trying to move everyone, even those who are not at risk," said Ines Ferreira de Abril, a local health worker.

"Many people have already moved out under the relentless pressure from the government. They are going house by house and ultimately, they want to get rid of all of us because this land is very valuable now. They want us out of the way before the big events."

* This article was amended on 6 December 2013 to clarify that Leo Gryner's comments about Vila Autódromo are disputed by residents. This article was further amended on 11 December 2013 to correct Renato Cinco's name, from Renata Silva as the original said.
Topics

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World Cup: Rio favelas being 'socially cleansed' in runup to sporting events

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The World Cup and the Olympics are being used as a pretext for "social cleansing" as tens of thousands of Rio slum dwellers are driven out to the city periphery, favela residents say.

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Gill Mooney - Leeds back-to-back housing

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Gill Mooney - Leeds back-to-back housing

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This provides some history, relevant to the Engels reading, about the history of back-to-back houses, still numerous in Leeds. They were erected as a way of housing large numbers of workers in reasonably small areas.

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Rainbow Plaques Launched Leeds Civic Trust has recently been working with Leeds City Council to create a special 'Rainbow Plaques' trail throughout Leeds city centre this summer. To celebrate Pride, we will be erecting a series of temporary Rainbow Plaques that will mark people, places and events that have shaped the City's LGBT+ story.

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From Housing Studies - An article looking at gated communities and the segregation of elites

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Fortress UK? Gated communities, the spatial revolt of the elites and time-space trajectories of segregation: Housing Studies: Vol 19, No 6

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Anecdotal evidence suggests that 'gated communities' are growing in popularity. This paper uses empirical evidence to profile the location and characteristics of gated development in England and details the relative integration of residents. The paper also attempts to think through the wider theoretical and urban policy impacts of gating.

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Guardian article

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More than 100 homeless people are "living" in the terminals of Heathrow airport this winter, according to official figures - a new and shameful record. Crisis and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have warned that homelessness in London is rising significantly faster than the nationwide average, and faster than official estimates. And yet, we don't see as many people sleeping rough as in previous economic downturns. Have our cities become better at hiding poverty, or have we become more adept at not seeing it?

Last year, there was great public outcry against the use of "anti-homeless" spikes outside a London residential complex, not far from where I live. Social media was set momentarily ablaze with indignation, a petition was signed, a sleep-in protest undertaken, Boris Johnson was incensed and within a few days they were removed. This week, however, it emerged that Selfridges had installed metal spikes outside one of its Manchester stores - apparently to "reduce litter and smoking ... following customer complaints". The phenomenon of "defensive" or "disciplinary" architecture, as it is known, remains pervasive.

From ubiquitous protrusions on window ledges to bus-shelter seats that pivot forward, from water sprinklers and loud muzak to hard tubular rests, from metal park benches with solid dividers to forests of pointed cement bollards under bridges, urban spaces are aggressively rejecting soft, human bodies.

We see these measures all the time within our urban environments, whether in London or Tokyo, but we fail to process their true intent. I hardly noticed them before I became homeless in 2009. An economic crisis, a death in the family, a sudden breakup and an even more sudden breakdown were all it took to go from a six-figure income to sleeping rough in the space of a year. It was only then that I started scanning my surroundings with the distinct purpose of finding shelter and the city's barbed cruelty became clear.

I learned to love London Underground's Circle line back then. To others it was just the rather inefficient yellow line on the tube network. To me - and many homeless people - it was a safe, dry, warm container, continually travelling sometimes above the surface, sometimes below, like a giant needle stitching London's centre into place. Nobody harassed you or moved you on. You were allowed to take your poverty on tour. But engineering work put a stop to that.

Next was a bench in a smallish park just off Pentonville Road. An old, wooden bench, made concave and smooth by thousands of buttocks, underneath a sycamore with foliage so thick that only the most persistent rain could penetrate it. Sheltered and warm, perched as it was against a wall behind which a generator of some sort radiated heat, this was prime property. Then, one morning, it was gone. In its place stood a convex metal perch, with three solid armrests. I felt such loss that day.

"When you're designed against, you know it," says Ocean Howell, who teaches architectural history at the University of Oregon, speaking about anti-skateboarding designs. "Other people might not see it, but you will. The message is clear: you are not a member of the public, at least not of the public that is welcome here." The same is true of all defensive architecture. The psychological effect is devastating.

There is a wider problem, too. These measures do not and cannot distinguish the "vagrant" posterior from others considered more deserving. When we make it impossible for the dispossessed to rest their weary bodies at a bus shelter, we also make it impossible for the elderly, for the infirm, for the pregnant woman who has had a dizzy spell. By making the city less accepting of the human frame, we make it less welcoming to all humans. By making our environment more hostile, we become more hostile within it.

Defensive architecture is revealing on a number of levels, because it is not the product of accident or thoughtlessness, but a thought process. It is a sort of unkindness that is considered, designed, approved, funded and made real with the explicit motive to exclude and harass. It reveals how corporate hygiene has overridden human considerations, especially in retail districts. It is a symptom of the clash of private and public, of necessity and property.

Pavement sprinklers have been installed by buildings as diverse as the famous Strand book store in New York, a fashion chain in Hamburg and government offices in Guangzhou. They spray the homeless intermittently, soaking them and their possessions. The assertion is clear: the public thoroughfare in front of a building, belongs to the building's occupant, even when it is not being used.

Setha Low, a professor in environmental psychology, and urban geographer Neil Smith, in their book The Politics of Public Space, describe the phenomenon as a creeping encroachment that has "culminated in the multiple closures, erasures, inundations and transfigurations of public space at the behest of state and corporate strategies". They contend that the very economic and political revolutions that freed people from autocratic monarchies also enshrined principles of private property at the expense of a long tradition of common land.

Sculptor Fabian Brunsing brought a satirical eye to the issue by creating the "pay bench", an art installation of a park bench that retracts its metal spikes for a limited time when the prospective sitter feeds it a coin. Chinese officials, completely missing the joke, thought that this was a great idea and installed similar benches in Yantai Park of the Shangdong province.

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Concrete spikes under a road bridge in Guangzhou city, Guangdong, China. Photograph: Imaginechina/REX

The architecture of our cities is a powerful guide to behaviour, both directly and in its symbolism. One of the very first acts of the newly elected Syriza government in Greece was to remove the metal barriers between the Hellenic parliament and Syntagma Square. The effect on the centre of Athens of the removal of this barricade - which represented the strife of the last few years - was almost magical, as if an entire city breathed a sigh of relief. The symbolism of a government saying that they were a part of the people, rather than apart from the people, was understood by all.

Artist Nils Norman has been documenting the phenomenon of defensive architecture since the late 90s with thousands of photographs. This "vernacular of terror", as he calls it, has its roots in leftover space or "gap sites": plots that are too small to develop but large enough to encourage loitering. He sees the loss of public space as directly related to a loss of public life. "City space is quietly altered to maximimise its control and circulation," he says. "Benches become bum-free, which in turn become 'perches', which are in turn removed. As city spaces become cleaner and more symbolically 'safe', defensive design becomes more abundant and paranoid."

Recently, as I walked into my local bakery, a homeless man (whom I had seen a few times before) asked whether I could get him something to eat. When I asked Ruth - one of the young women who work behind the counter - to put a couple of pasties in a separate bag and explained why, her censure was severe: "He probably makes more money than you from begging, you know," she said, bluntly.

He probably didn't. Half his face was covered with sores. A blackened, gangrenous-looking toe protruded from a hole in his ancient shoe. His left hand looked mangled and was covered in dry blood from some recent accident or fight. I pointed this out. Ruth was unmoved by my protestations. "I don't care," she said. "They foul in the green opposite. They're a menace. Animals."

It's precisely this viewpoint that defensive architecture upholds. That the destitute are a different species altogether; inferior and responsible for their demise. Like pigeons to be shooed away; urban foxes disturbing our slumber with their screams. "Shame on you," jumped in Libby, the older lady who works at the bakery. "That is someone's son you're talking about."

We curse the destitute for urinating in public spaces with no thought about how far the nearest free public toilet might be. We blame them for their poor hygiene without questioning the lack of public facilities for washing. It costs £5 to take a shower at King's Cross station. Wilful misconceptions about homelessness abound. For instance, that shelters are plentiful and sleeping rough is a lifestyle choice. Free shelters, unless one belongs to a particularly vulnerable group, are actually extremely rare. Getting a bed often depends on a referral from a local agency, which, in turn, depends on being able to prove a local connection. For the majority of homeless people, who have usually graduated from a life as itinerant sofa-surfers, it is impossible to prove.

This tripartite pressure of an increasingly hostile built environment, huge reduction in state budgets, and a hardening attitude to poverty can be disastrous for people sleeping rough, both physically and psychologically. Fundamental misunderstanding of destitution is designed to exonerate the rest from responsibility and insulate them from perceiving risk. All of us are encouraged to spend future earnings through credit. For the spell to be effective, it is essential to be in a sort of denial about the possibility that such future earnings could dry up. Most of us are a couple of pay packets from being insolvent. We despise homeless people for bringing us face to face with that fact.

Poverty exists as a parallel, but separate, reality. City planners work very hard to keep it outside our field of vision. It is too miserable, too dispiriting, too painful to look at someone defecating in a park or sleeping in a doorway and think of him as "someone's son". It is easier to see him and ask only the unfathomably self-centred question: "How does his homelessness affect me?" So we cooperate with urban design and work very hard at not seeing, because we do not want to see. We tacitly agree to this apartheid.

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Spikes installed outside Selfridges in Manchester. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian.

A homeless man, Pawel Koseda, was found dead last year; bled out, impaled on the six-inch spikes of the metal fence that surrounds St Mary Abbots in Kensington, the Camerons' chosen place of worship. He had high levels of alcohol in his blood and was wearing hospital pyjamas under his clothes. Koseda used to be a university lecturer in Poland. Ed Boord, who found the body, said that several people walked by and didn't even notice. "It upset me that someone like that spends their life not being noticed," he said, "and even in their last moments people still walk past."

Crisis and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's research says that UK homeless numbers have increased by a third in the last five years. Benefit sanctions are cited as the main reason. In this context of depressed wages and soaring living costs, reduced services and lack of housing, we are facing a humanitarian disaster. The Red Cross is involved in food aid in the UK for the first time since the second world war. Can our response as a civilised society really be limited to moving people on from our doorsteps?

This, more than anything else, will determine our future as a species. Our ability to share will be key to our survival. The rough sleeper's bad fortune is intricately connected to someone else's good fortune. The person sleeping outside the expensive Bond Street boutique is part of the same nexus as the person inside spending £500 on a pair of socks.

Resources are scarce. Infinite wealth creation is a fairytale. Real wealth - land, food, water, fuel - has physical limitations. If some take more than they need, others go without. We obsessively focus on the external: carbon emissions, recycling, charity work, social security, saving the snow leopard - all of them excellent goals - while doggedly refusing to look inwards and make the adjustments that might allow us to coexist more equitably.

A ray of hope from Vancouver - benches that unfold into shelters and read "This is a bench" during the day, but light up to reveal "This is a bedroom" at night. Perhaps a small step on what David Harvey, author of Social Justice and the City, calls the "path from an urbanism based on exploitation to an urbanism appropriate for the human species".

Defensive architecture acts as the airplane curtain that separates economy from business and business from first class, protecting those further forward from the envious eyes of those behind. It keeps poverty unseen and sanitises our shopping centres, concealing any guilt for over-consuming. It speaks volumes about our collective attitude to poverty in general and homelessness in particular. It is the aggregated, concrete, spiked expression of a lack of generosity of spirit.

Ironically, it doesn't even achieve its basic goal of making us feel safer. There is no way of locking others out that doesn't also lock us in. The narrower the arrow-slit, the larger outside dangers appear. Making our urban environment hostile breeds hardness and isolation. It makes life a little uglier for all of us.
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Defensive architecture: keeping poverty unseen and deflecting our guilt

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More than 100 homeless people are "living" in the terminals of Heathrow airport this winter, according to official figures - a new and shameful record. Crisis and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation have warned that homelessness in London is rising significantly faster than the nationwide average, and faster than official estimates.

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There's no scientific metric for measuring a city's personality. But step out on the sidewalk, and you can see and feel it. Two physicists explain one tidy mathematical formula that they believe holds the key to what drives a city. Yet math can't explain most of the human-scale details that make urban life unique. So we head out in search of what the numbers miss, and meet a reluctant city dweller, a man who's walked 700 feet below Manhattan, and a once-thriving community that's slipping away.

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One tidy mathematical formula may hold the key to how cities work. We take to the streets to test the numbers, & ask what really makes cities tick.

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Katy Wright - Guardian article on cities

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Katy Wright - Guardian article on cities

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"What makes a city attractive?

Mystery, visible life and organised complexity, says the School of Life"
Article and video linked below

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Is there an "art of making attractive cities"? London-based alternative education group The School of Life (founded by Alain de Botton) seem to think so, and have made a video that, they claim, explains just how to do it.

Is there an "art of making attractive cities"? London-based alternative education group The School of Life (founded by Alain de Botton) seem to think so, and have made a video that, they claim, explains just how to do it.

According to their manifesto, there are six fundamental things a city needs to "get right" if it is to be deemed beautiful. First up is order. Order is the reason we love Paris and New York, we're told. But we must avoid too much of it. Excessive regularity can be "soul-destroying, relentless and harsh," so what we want is organised complexity. Humans simply "adore" cities midway between chaos and boringness. Apparently.

Next we have "visible life": streets need to be full of people and activity in order to be beautiful instead of bleak. The third principle is ensuring that our cities are compact, not sprawling. Think Barcelona, not Phoenix, Arizona.

The next rule of attractive cities is "orientation and mystery": the ability to both get lost and to not get lost (you've lost me), which is achieved by a balance between small streets and big ones. This leads to the fifth principle, which is scale. Our urban skylines have become dominated by tall buildings dedicated to banking and commerce. Instead, we should be building at an ideal height of five stories, resulting in dense and medium-rise cities, like Berlin and Amsterdam. If there are tall buildings in a city they should be dedicated to something "all of humanity can love." I've never seen a building unite all of humanity, but I'm interested to find out.

Finally, the sixth key to making a city attractive is to "make it local". Which is to say, cities should embrace their unique characters of place and avoid sameness.

So what's stopping us from making our cities attractive? An intellectual confusion around beauty and a lack of political will, says The School of Life. We'd love to hear your thoughts though.

While there are certainly other things more important in a city than how it looks, what do you think about these guidelines for beauty? And what, in your eyes, makes a city attractive?

Share your photographs, videos and stories and we'll collect the best on Guardian Cities. Just click on the blue 'Contribute' button, or if you're out and about you can download the free GuardianWitness app for smartphones.

GuardianWitness is the home of user-generated content on the Guardian. Contribute your video, pictures and stories, and browse news, reviews and creations submitted by others. Posts will be reviewed prior to publication on GuardianWitness, and the best pieces will feature on the Guardian site.
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Is there an "art of making attractive cities"? London-based alternative education group The School of Life (founded by Alain de Botton) seem to think so, and have made a video that, they claim, explains just how to do it. Is there an "art of making attractive cities"?

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This is a clip demonstrating one woman’s experience walking through the streets of New York City. Throughout this clip we see verbal harassment occur frequently, exemplifying both the fear and disorder that exists within urban spaces. This element of ‘city life’ has been accepted as something women just have to deal with. When reflecting on the work of Jacobs (2014) we could discuss how such harassment contributes to the disorder of a city as well as consider methods for its solution

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Afreen Ali- Urban Regeneration Industry in Leeds (East Bank)

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Afreen Ali- Urban Regeneration Industry in Leeds (East Bank)

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The East Bank area in Leeds was targeted for Urban Regeneration between 1996 and 2003. It shares Leeds industrial heritage and during the 1980's it was made up of high density Victorian terraces with industry along the River Aire and around the neighbouring New Clarence Dock (student accommodation). The East Bank Regeneration Project has been the attraction of £800 million private sector investment where they seek to expand regeneration in certain areas.

This initial investment was used to refurbish existing council property, build many new properties, environmental improvements including the construction of a multi-sports court and skate parks.

Changes between 1996 and 2006 include the alteration of South Accommodation Road which has been widened and a new bridge constructed over the River Aire to improve the A61. The remaining industries along the waterfront have either been replaced by new residential or office developments and recreational spaces have been improved with a skate park and basketball court, football pitch and two new children’s play areas.

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'Becuase I am a Girl' Urban Programme Study 

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'Becuase I am a Girl' Urban Programme Study 

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http://plan-international.org/files/global/publications/campaigns/adolescent-girls-views-on-safety-in-cities.pdf

Some interesting findings in this research looking at adolescent Girls' Views on safety in cities.

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Jack Palmer = Gated Communities and Safety: the Case of Trayvon Martin

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Jack Palmer = Gated Communities and Safety: the Case of Trayvon Martin

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Reuters

The neighborhood where Trayvon Martin died is the kind of place where people choose to live when they want to be safe - from crime, from outsiders, from economic uncertainty. Of course, it doesn't always work that way.

Editors Note: This piece originally ran in April 2012. We are re-posting it now in light of the court verdict finding George Zimmerman not guilty of the murder of Trayvon Martin.

The shooting death of Trayvon Martin has caused an epidemic of soul-searching in the United States. In the weeks since George Zimmerman pulled the trigger in that Florida gated community, it feels as though the entire nation has been busy trying to explain to ourselves what happened and why. We want desperately to find some sort of lesson. Maybe we're looking for redemption.

People who care about the way our cities and suburbs are built and organized have been no exception. In a post on Better! Cities and Towns, Robert Steuteville posited that "a poorly planned, exclusionary built environment" was a factor in Martin's death.

The Retreat at Twin Lakes, where Martin died, is the kind of place where people choose to live when they want to be safe - from crime, from outsiders, from economic uncertainty. Of course, it doesn't always work that way. By fostering suspicion and societal divisions, the argument goes, gated communities can paradoxically compromise safety rather than increasing it. And because they cut residents off from the larger community, writes Edward Blakely, author of Fortress America, they can "shrink the notion of civic engagement and allow residents to retreat from civic responsibility."

The prevalence of gated communities has steadily risen across the United States and the world since the 1960s. Firm numbers are hard to come by, but Blakely cites census figures showing that between 6 and 9 million Americans live behind gates.

Rich Benjamin, author of Searching for Whitopia, wrote in The New York Times:

Gated communities churn a vicious cycle by attracting like-minded residents who seek shelter from outsiders and whose physical seclusion then worsens paranoid groupthink against outsiders.

I called Richard Schneider, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Florida and a specialist in place-based crime prevention, to find out what he thought of the discussion surrounding Martin's death.

The answer is, according to Schneider, that there are no easy answers. "It's hard to make a generalization," he tells me, pointing out that there are many different types of gated communities catering to all parts of the economic and social spectrum. Some of them are walkable; some are not. Some are racially mixed (as is the Retreat at Twin Lakes), and some are not. Some are relatively affordable -- you can find gated trailer parks - and some are filled with McMansions. Many of them are indistinguishable from any other suburban neighborhood. Did the built environment play a role in Martin's death? Add it to the list of things we can never really know for sure about this terrible case.

As for whether gated communities deliver on one of their main selling points - protection from crime - Schneider says that research to date has been inconclusive. "It's not a panacea," he says about erecting gates. "You're just as likely to be burgled by your next-door neighbor, especially if there are teenagers." Criminals from outside are also quick to figure out how to get in. "They learn the code from the pizza guy," says Schneider. "The effects of gating decay over time."

Gated communities exploded in popularity in the United States during the end of the 20th century, but Schneider points out that they are an old phenomenon. "We used to call them castles," he says.

Today, in the places where the urban population is growing fastest, such as India, gated communities are increasingly fashionable for all the same reasons that they have been fashionable here in the United States - safety, prestige, privacy, exclusivity. If urbanists' worst fears about gated communities are true, the scale of what is happening in India, China, Brazil (where they are known as "condomínios fechados"), and many other rapidly urbanizing countries around the world is chilling.

Take the case of Gurgaon, a booming suburb of New Delhi that has sprung up from nearly nothing in the last 20 years. Now, dozens of multinational companies have located in the city, and more than 1.5 million people live there. For the middle class, gated communities are the clear choice, the only way to live the dream of affluence in the midst of a chaotic, dysfunctional, completely unplanned municipality.

In a fascinating 2009 documentary about Gurgaon, some of its most privileged residents explain what they are looking for when they settle in one of the massive residential compounds.

"I wanted safety and security above everything else," says Shilpa Sonal, a marketing consultant who lives in a development aptly called Nirvana. "We are sensitive, we have like-minded people in Nirvana. ... So we understand each other. That's one of the best things Nirvana offers."

The residents of these complexes rely on backup power when municipal power fails (as it frequently does), and are shielded from the sewage that runs through the streets outside the walls. In their workplaces, in their recreational clubs, in their shopping malls, they are constantly cocooned by private infrastructure. "The future is about these kinds of spaces, where one can control public activities," says sociologist Sanjay Srivastava. "These spaces one can allow an intense interaction between people who are similar."

The residents of Gurgaon's glossy residential enclaves don't need to think about the slum-dwellers just down the road, and many of them probably do only rarely. One of the women in the film is shown giving her young sons four 10-rupee notes as they set out for the swim club in their SUV. "We have to find four beggars today," she announces brightly, explaining how helpful 10 rupees (about 20 cents) is to a member of the city's underclass.

Shilpa Sonal is different. She participates in a program that helps to train women in Gurgaon's slums to sew or make simple crafts that can bring them extra income. She keenly recognizes the inequity represented by the gates that separate the leafy compounds and the dusty shantytowns: "They look at us but they are nowhere near us," she says of the people who live in tin shacks less than a mile from apartments worth half a million dollars or more. "A lot of crime is growing. The mall culture they are exposed to is something that is so unreal, they can never be a part of it. The more they see it, the more the frustration level rises."

Her words echo the findings presented in a UN-Habitat report that Richard Schneider contributed to:

[S]ignificant impacts of gating are seen in the real and potential spatial and social fragmentation of cities, leading to the diminished use and availability of public space and increased socioeconomic polarization. In this context, gating has been characterized as having counterintuitive impacts, even increasing crime and the fear of crime as the middle classes abandon public streets to the vulnerable poor, to street children and families, and to the offenders who prey on them. Such results also tend to broaden gaps between classes insomuch as wealthier citizens living in relatively homogeneous urban enclaves protected by private security forces have less need or opportunity to interact with poorer counterparts.

Sonal likes the home she has made for her family behind the gates, but she recognizes that perhaps the walls provide a false sense of security: "It is so unreal that it is like a bubble which will burst," she says. "How long can you keep these two things apart?"

If the case of Trayvon Martin has shown us anything, it's that a society's problems - inequity, racism, and fear among them - have no problem getting through the gates.

Top image: Will Reese holds a protest sign in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the Trayvon Martin trial, in the Harlem neighborhood of New York. (Keith Bedford /Reuters)

About the Author

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The neighborhood where Trayvon Martin died is the kind of place where people choose to live when they want to be safe - from crime, from outsiders, from economic uncertainty. Of course, it doesn't always work that way. Editors Note: This piece originally ran in April 2012.

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The city of Leeds was once a Victorian powerhouse of capital accumulation, high employment, rich industrialists and grand civic architecture. Today the city centre markets itself as a haven for financial services, high-end shopping, and innovative PFI schemes. The financial crisis of 2008 has caused this story to stutter, but will this allow other visions to raise their heads? Leeds Plan C explore how this might play out in the Hunslet area of Leeds.

Leeds is haunted by the ghosts of developments past; both the buildings that didn't come to pass and the futures those failed projects promised. Of these it's Leeds' ghost towers that are most visible, although of course only through their absence. There are gaps in the skyline, holes in the ground. The failure of the council's 'Tall Buildings' policy may be hidden behind hoardings, but no one is fooled. And as the plan to develop Leeds upwards has faltered we move to the default, development outwards.

Just a mile south-east of the city centre, Hunslet was once home to Leeds' manufacturing and heavy engineering industries. A rump of those industries remains but the working class which laboured in them was broken up and relocated by the redevelopment of the late 1960s. Fifty years later, Hunslet and South East Leeds stand on the verge of another episode of 'regeneration'. With plentiful brown field sites and cheap corrugated buildings, it's the prime target for the outwards spread of the city centre. Yet as we researched the often obscured development plans, as we walked the area and pieced the different schemes together, it soon became clear that they didn't add up. So, on a sunny day in early May, we led a guided walk around the area to discuss the various ways this could all play out.

We began the walk in the Tetley building, now an arts centre, which only a few years ago served as the centre of Tetley's brewery complex. The smell of hops that once floated across the city centre is gone for good and so too are the jobs the brewery provided - up to a thousand in its heyday. The Tetley building now sits isolated in the middle of a large car park - a familiar sight in a city choked by cars and lacking effective or affordable public transport. Yet the creative industries, for which the Tetley is an outlier, are central to the story being told about Hunslet. They are meant to provide not just 'destination' attractions to drag consumers across the river Aire, but also to provide employment. And it's here that the development story starts to break down.

The creative industries are an elastic category. In Hunslet they include not just the cultural sector but also the world of digital start-ups. There has been wild talk of South Leeds becoming the new 'silicon roundabout', ignoring the fact of the original in Shoreditch. The dissipation of the latter in the face of rising real estate prices shows the real source of 'growth' in the UK. In Hunslet, an ex-casino is to be re-developed into a 'super building' called the Engine. It will contain 'flexible workspace' allowing entrepreneurs and 'creatives' to rent table space by the hour and create synergy in the coffee shops. This may seem familiar as the same story is trotted out up and down the country. Embarrassingly, the same spiel was told about Leeds' previous development target, the adjoining area of Holbeck, which just four or five years ago was crowned Leeds' creative quarter. If it didn't work there then why should it work two miles to the East?

The problem is not geographic, it is inherent to the digital and creative industries. Even when they succeed they just don't employ many people. When Instagram, a popular photo-sharing site, was sold to Facebook for $1 billion in 2012, it had 30 million users, yet it only employed 13 people. In comparison Kodak, which filed for bankruptcy a few months earlier, employed 145,000 people at its height. The production of phone apps is never going to provide the kind of mass employment that Holbeck's industry once did.

The other new jobs in the area will be in the public sector, more specifically in education. There are plans to open a new school in Hunslet in 2016. Several further education colleges are also being built. But where will the students come from? No doubt they'll end up being bussed in but officially the school is meant to promote inner-city family living. There is talk of 8,000 new housing units in the area, many of these family homes. Those young professionals now living in a cramped city centre flat, so the story goes, will no longer need to move to the suburbs to raise a family. They will just cross the river into a vibrant but family-friendly community. Yet a quick walk around the neighbourhood raises some serious doubts - it is dominated by traffic. When Leeds became the 'motorway city of the 70s' and the M1 was brought to the city centre, Hunslet was cut in half. This played a big role in the area's depopulation. Today it's still a traffic hub, a noisy and polluted place which people and things pass through on the way to somewhere else. Not the kind of location where many people would choose to raise children.

So what do we do with this story that won't make sense? We could look for corruption and ask who owns the crumbling buildings that litter the site. Developers, after all, don't need their plans to work out in the long term as long as a buzz is generated and real estate prices rise in the short term. But is such research enough? Won't its revelation just reinforce the prevailing mood of public cynicism? Is this politically effective? Perhaps we need to move beyond critique and propose different ideas of the future.

Hunslet is a peculiar case of drawn out gentrification. Its depopulation in the 60s and 70s makes the usual campaigning approach unfeasible. We can't defend the rights of existing residents if none are being displaced. This gives us a chance to ask a different question: if current plans don't make sense then what would be needed to make them work? Let's put it another way. The story of creative jobs in a green and vibrant family environment is attractive. The desires for this sort of life are currently being mobilised towards a real estate scam. But can they be mobilised in a different direction? Can they trigger the kinds of political struggle and campaigns that might actually bring their alternatives? And along the way can we make these desires more equitable and sustainable?

The first change we need is in transport. The private monopoly of public transport has been a disaster. Prices have risen so fast that families consider taxis the cheaper option. If cars are to stop clogging the roads and polluting the air then fares need to come down and free public transport must be the horizon. Such campaigns may not sound glamorous but they can have far-reaching effects. The Brazilian Summer/Autumn of mass protests in 2013 was sparked by a small group acting on precisely this demand.

The other side to the reduction of prices is the raising of incomes - but how can this be achieved when well-paying jobs are ever scarcer? One idea that makes sense in this context is the Universal Basic Income, which guarantees basic needs regardless of employment. Not only would this strengthen the hand of labour when demanding higher wages but it might also allow the spread of creative jobs for all who want them. The dictatorship of the unpaid intern would finally come to an end. It could also lead to the enlargement of the collaborative commons, which have been revealed by digital technology but whose potential goes much further. If we followed such a path, more and more of our lives could be extracted from the dictates of the market. Of course this would not be easy to bring about, but its logic follows from the myth of the 'good life' currently on offer.

Chief amongst the obstacles in our way is the current distribution of power. Economic inequalities in Leeds are sky high, with large parts written off as surplus populations. Surplus to requirements and so simply a public order issue. We desperately need affordable housing and the end of subsidies for landlords. What we don't need is more luxury accommodation. Yet the council's policy of 'developer-led development' locks in the super-rich's monopoly over visions for the city. So ultimately we need to re-democratise, to shift the balance of power. Any development that doesn't address existing inequalities will only reinforce them.

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The city of Leeds was once a Victorian powerhouse of capital accumulation, high employment, rich industrialists and grand civic architecture. Today the city centre markets itself as a haven for financial services, high-end shopping, and innovative PFI schemes. The financial crisis of 2008 has caused this story to stutter, but will this allow other visions to raise their heads?

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This is an interesting article on how public squares in cities symbolize the dialectic between order/disorder.

I visited Tunis in early 2014 and saw a number of legacies of the 2010 protests which sparked the Arab Spring, not least rolls and rolls of barbed wire – which has a long history of complicity in the ‘ordering’ practices of modernity - sealing off the former sites of protest and disorder in front of various ministries.

The article seems to associate this method of ordering and controlling and unruly citizenry with 'autocratic' or 'dictatorial' governments, but more subtle forms of surveillance and design might be detected on our own cities. Note the proliferation of CCTV cameras in Leeds City Centre for instance, or consider the 'kettling' method employed by police to contain a number of high-profile protests in London in recent years.

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For Libya, Tripoli's main public square has come to symbolize the success of the country's 2011 revolution. Originally named Piazza Italia under Italian colonial rule (Western European-inspired central squares are a common theme in this part of the world) and then Independence Square by the Libyan monarchy, it had been renamed "Green Square" after Muammar Qaddafi's political ideology. Libya's transitional government promptly renamed it Martyrs' Square after those who died fighting Qaddafi's regime in Libya's civil war.

But these public spaces don't always survive the revolutionary moments that make them famous. Bahrain's most prominent public square (or circle) met the same fate as the uprising that once filled it. After demonstrators marched to Manana's Pearl Roundabout in March 2011, the Bahraini government retook the circle in a bloody crackdown, then tore up the grass with backhoes and demolished the central Pearl Monument to reassert control.

In many ways, France pioneered the conscious use of urban design for political purposes. Paris in the early 19th century was essentially a medieval city, suffocating from overcrowding and poor infrastructure. Baron Haussmann's urban renovations under Napoleon III in the 1850s and 1860s gave the City of Light a modern sewage system, beautiful suburban parks, and a network of train stations. He also took the opportunity to demolish unruly lower-class neighborhoods, banish their impoverished inhabitants to suburbs, and replace their cramped, narrow alleys with spacious, grand boulevards. In the event of an uprising, like those that took place in 1789, 1830, and 1848, French authorities hoped the wider streets would be both harder for revolutionary Parisians to barricade and easier for columns of French soldiers to march through to suppress revolts.

Similar calculations are still made today. In 2005, Burma's ruling junta moved the government from Yangon, a sprawling metropolis of 5 million people, to the new inland capital at Naypyidaw for security reasons. Isolated from other population centers, Naypyidaw is populated mostly by government functionaries and military officials who spend as little time as possible in the eerily desolate city. Burmese officials claim almost a million people live there, although the true population is likely far, far lower than that.

When the Saffron Revolution erupted two years later, in 2007, the large-scale protests that rocked other Burmese cities never took hold in Naypyidaw, and the country's military rulers remained in power after a brief but brutal crackdown. Even if the city's population had been large enough for demonstrations, where would they have taken place? Broad boulevards demarcate the specially designated neighborhoods where officials live, with no public square or central space for residents, unruly or otherwise, to congregate. A moat even surrounds the presidential palace. One journalist described the city as " dictatorship by cartography."

Kazakhstan's Nursultan Nazarbayev, meanwhile, relocated his seat of power to Astana, a capital deep in the Kazakh steppe filled with futuristic architecture to dazzle visitors. Russian President Vladimir Putin looked to the past for inspiration: In 2008, he revived the Soviet tradition of massive military parades in Moscow's Red Square to project strength. Not blunt enough? Saudi authorities use Riyadh's Deera Square to carry out official public beheadings.

Others are more subtle. In Pyongyang, the austere, imposing capital of the world's last totalitarian state, conformity oozes from every hulking mass of concrete. Only the most loyal North Koreans are allowed to reside in the city's many identical apartment blocks, a common characteristic of Stalinist urban design. North Korea's largest city is defined by the "large monuments of questionable taste [that] dot the cityscape ... linked by absurdly wide Haussmannian boulevards and colossal public squares devoid of an actual public." The abundant public space exists solely to glorify the state and the Kim regime's personality cult.

If too much public space can be a bad thing, then China's Tiananmen Square is the worst offender. The world's fourth-largest square can paradoxically be considered "the opposite of a public space," wrote Tim Waterman and Ed Wall in their book on landscape architecture. Tiananmen's "totalitarian scale dwarfs the individual and forces them to feel subservient to the power of the state. It is a space best suited to parading troops and weaponry, not to active citizen participation in the daily life of a metropolis." The 1989 tank-led suppression of pro-democracy activists occupying the square serves as a stark reminder of how mass demonstrations can fail.

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For Libya, Tripoli's main public square has come to symbolize the success of the country's 2011 revolution. Originally named Piazza Italia under Italian colonial rule (Western European-inspired central squares are a common theme in this part of the world) and then Independence Square by the Libyan monarchy, it had been renamed "Green Square" after Muammar Qaddafi's political ideology.

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Kirsteen Paton - Thinking Allowed Programme on Walter Benjamin

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Kirsteen Paton - Thinking Allowed Programme on Walter Benjamin

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Walter Benjamin, Thinking Allowed - BBC Radio 4

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Special programme on the work and influence of the pioneering German intellectual.

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Katy Wright - quote about flaneur and consumer culture 

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Katy Wright - quote about flaneur and consumer culture 

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If the flaneur has disappeared as a specific figure, it is because the perceptive attitude which he embodied saturates modern existence, specifically, the society of mass consumption (and is the source of its illusions). The same can be argued for all of Benjamin’s historical figures. In commodity society all of us are prostitutes, selling ourselves to strangers; all of us are collectors of things.

Susan Buck-Morss, ‘The Fl â neur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering’

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Jack Palmer - Walter Benjamin and the Parisian Arcades

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Jack Palmer - Walter Benjamin and the Parisian Arcades

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This is an excerpt from Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project set to some contemporary images of Paris, the city that he 'flaneured' around and interpreted in the early 20th century.

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A wander through the arcades of Paris with a reading from Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. Reading by Heidi Lapaine

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This is an advert for 'luxury living' by the London branch of the property developers Redrow. It has a very dystopian feel (post-apocalyptic, almost!). Why is the city being represented in this way? Why is so much emphasis being attributed to the individual and finding a 'luxury living space'?

'To look out of the city, that could have swallowed you whole, and think "I did this", to stand with the world at your feet'. This line presents a hyper-individualised, neoliberal twist on a sentiment expressed at the beginning of Georg Simmel's The Metropolis and Mental Life, regarding the metropolitan individual's 'resistance to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism' of the city

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Unique Real Estate Investment Opportunity

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St George 's Hill Estate Weybridge | Octagon Property Video

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Luxury Life Of Monaco & A Luxury Tour Of Monaco

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Redrow London's luxury development promo video

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Property developer Redrow has withdrawn this promotional video for new luxury homes in east London following widespread ridicule on Twitter